Month: December 2025

Gifts from the tree

When our Christmas tree arrived I found three ladybirds shortly afterwards and wondered if they’d come with the tree. It’s now nine days since we’ve had the tree and I’ve found three unusual ‘butterflies’. Two were fluttering against the windows yesterday morning and I let them out. There have been Monarch butterflies, lots of white butterflies, and the occasional red and yellow admiral butterfly in the garden, but the ladybirds and ‘butterflies’ were inside the house. Felix was playing with this one on the floor this morning. I thought it was dead and picked it up to photograph it for iNaturalist which identified it as a Magpie moth. I also found it in City Nature.

Source: City Nature, A Guide to the plants and animals of New Zealand cities and towns, by Bob Brockie

While I was doing all this, it revived and flew up to the window which I opened so it could fly away – whilst restraining Felix.

What else is lurking in the tree? What do they make of their altered habitat? And do they come in threes? Three wise men, perhaps?

Memory Lane

It amused me to take a detour to walk down Memory Lane as I went to meet friends for lunch today. I spotted it on the map, running between Tuam and St Asaph Streets. The lane itself was pretty nondescript, but I found a cool little bit of street art on St Asaph. Later, when we came out of the restaurant in the Salt District, there was a depiction of Johnson’s Grocers. Both of these places: the Dog House which used to be in the Square, and Johnson’s which used to be in Colombo Street, do take me back down memory lane.

Blackcurrant Buckle

Chefs must be up against it thinking of with new words for their creations. Recently I’ve come across ‘shrub’ as a drink – and now ‘buckle’ as a cake. Anyway, I have now made both using fruit from the garden. I made two shrubs in autumn: grape and cranberry – now languishing in the fridge waiting to be used in a mocktail, perhaps. A lot of effort for little result, really. The buckle, on the other hand, is rather delicious as a dessert. It consists of a chocolate cake base, blackcurrant middle and crumble topping.

I found the recipe on the internet (thank you tinandthyme.uk) and made slight alterations: I used all the blackcurrants I picked this afternoon rather than just 250g, and added crumbled weetbix to the topping.

I used to bake my blackcurrants in a shortcake using the gooseberry shortcake recipe from the Edmonds Cookbook, but it’s nice to have a change.

It would be nice to have gooseberries. Sadly, although I have four gooseberry bushes, there was just one solitary gooseberry this year. What am I doing wrong? I thought maybe they are too shaded, but there was a very productive gooseberry bush right underneath an old pine tree in a place where I lived once. Looking on the internet, I can see that lots of people have the same problem and there are lots of suggestions – some of which I’ve tried in the past. I’ve become too afraid to prune them in case I cut off the fruiting wood.

Sleeping it off

Felix was up at the crack of noon* today, unusually. Here he was at 10am, still asleep on his rug on top of an old trunk and suitcase behind Mum’s chair – but looking warily as I took a photo..

Teddy and bunny often get pushed over the edge

Perhaps he wasn’t ready for his breakfast because he was still digesting the mouse he caught last evening. I was alerted to this when I went into my room to close the french doors and discovered a pile of books in disarray. After a long moment of ‘What the…?’ as my brain cogs engaged, I checked under the bed with a torch and found some bits and pieces, which turned out to be a little tail, two tiny paws and something else I couldn’t identify. I swept them up, along with pieces of a book which had somehow been chewed in the chase. Later, I found some clothes on the floor where they’d fallen from the bottom rung of a ladder shelf, and the shoes underneath upturned. I guess the battle was fought on several fronts. Just as well the poor wee mouse didn’t run up the Christmas tree.

A card in support of Women’s Refuge

*This expression has amused me since the 1970s when I read it in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

Flowers for picking

It’s a sweet morning task to pick sweet peas. I have to stand on the garden seat to reach them now, and some of the stalks are quite short. Two vases are required: one for short stalks and one for long. The fragrance is lovely.

A stalk of Christmas lilies, which a friend gave me from her garden on Monday, fills the air with festive fragrance, especially when combined with the pine scent of the Christmas tree.

Mum enjoyed decorating the tree on Sunday – supervised by Felix.

Not so good vibrations

Piles are being driven into the ground three doors along from me, where there was once a modest wooden house on a modest piece of land. The vibrations have put us on edge for several days now, but this morning seems worse. Our post-traumatic earthquake stress is reactivated. The ground is shaking. Plates are clattering on the shelf. The rose bush outside my window is trembling.

Pile-driver in action

I walked down to see for myself. How does that repetitive, bone-jarring work affect the operator of the pile driver, I wondered. A passerby who lives on an adjacent street told me he can feel the vibrations as he works from home. Messages from our street’s on-line chat tells me others are disturbed by it as well, and that two-storeyed townhouses are being built on this small site. One neighbour thinks that ‘the new city council flood modelling requires deep piles for high foundations’. Hearsay is that this is the last day of the work. Here’s hoping.

I can hear the clang of the pile driver and then a delayed deep thud and vibration. It’s driving me to do distracting things such as vacuuming and mowing the lawn.

Not censored here

Cineraria Silverdust is a truly striking plant producing deeply divided silver, fern-like foliage. This exquisite foliage plant will provide elegant colour accent to the garden creating both form and contrast. The bright yellow daisy-like flowers produced should ideally be removed.

https://www.zealandia.co.nz/products/growflora/cineraria-silverdust/

The feverfew (so prolific I call it ‘fever several’) is beginning to flower and with some cineraria silver dust flowers which had snapped off in the wind, I thought there was a touch of Van Gogh to this arrangement. As long as there are flowers which attract pollinators, I won’t remove them just to make a plant attractive for its elegance and form in the garden.

Spiced Coffee

I love the old-fashioned pink of the Spiced Coffee rose. Today I picked the first flower to open. It has a delightfully spicy scent.

There are more flowers to come which is lovely to see as the plant has had a hard life. I moved it to comparative safety in a pot and it is good to see it, still delicate, but thriving.